After a six-hour outage on October 4, 2021 that impacted 3.5 billion people relying on three monopolistic properties (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram), Facebook blogged an update on October 5, 2021 regarding the cause:  “We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.” 

What sort of “faulty configuration change” would take down three separate massive online properties relying on servers and cloud services spread across the world?  According to one cloud provider:  “It was as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.”    Facebook is not disclosing any further details – the fact that it lost about $545,000 in U.S. ad revenue per hour is not sufficient to trigger disclosure given that this outage will likely have little long-term effect on its revenue growth.  Accordingly, only if another Facebook whistleblower steps forward will any real insight become public.

With any luck, on December 6, 2021, one tiny case in India will help pop the Facebook balloon once and for all.